Fogel

Maurice Fogel was a giant among mentalists. Like the greatest mind readers in this series, he married talent and ingenuity to showmanship and a deep, lifelong study of human behaviour. He combined magic with mind reading without apology, and he was probably best known for a bullet-catch routine that risked his life for his art. Above all, he was a showman who understood, better than almost anyone, how to sell a moment.

He is also a pivotal figure in this story, for it was Fogel who gave Britain its first true one-man mental act in variety. The Amazing Fogel did not merely perform mentalism; he dramatised it, turning a quiet demonstration of thought into theatre that could fill a music hall.

An East End Childhood

Maurice Fogel was born in London's East End on 7 July 1911, the eldest of seven children of Jewish Polish parents, Nathan and Malka, who had arrived in England the year before. His father worked first as a baker and then as a tailor. With little money to spare, the boy spent his free hours in the local library and became a voracious reader, and it was there that he came across a book by Professor Hoffmann. The flame was lit and the addiction took hold. He read, too, of the bullet catch, and of the fact that even Houdini was too afraid to attempt it, a challenge that lodged in his mind and would one day define his career. Leaving school at fourteen, top of his class, he joined the Oxford and St George's club, which gave him both new material and, crucially, audiences to face.

Learning from Rameses

His mother hoped he would become a rabbi and his father wanted him in the family tailoring business, but Nathan, recognising his son's passion and knowing the magician Albert Marchinski, who performed as Rameses, found a third path. He invested in the Rameses show, and Maurice was given a role. It was the making of him. Working the sideshows, Fogel learned the hard art of street performance, how to gather a crowd, hold it and turn it into a paying audience, sometimes drawing people in by hypnotising a goose. "There is nothing like working a sideshow," he later said, "because you knew that unless you could get people to pay to come in, you did not eat." He learned to take a small effect and build it into something fit for a large stage, and he learned to be a showman, a marketer and a serious maker of magic. The apprenticeship ended only when Marchinski died in 1930.

Finding a Performance Identity

At nineteen he joined the Magicians' Club, his entrance fee paid by his friend Alec Simpson of Simpsons of Piccadilly, and was thrown into the company of the finest professionals of the day, among them his lifelong friend Robert Harbin. For five years he searched for his own performing identity, trying cards, coins and traditional magic under different personas, even briefly billing himself as Vogel. The breakthrough came in 1937 when he won a talent competition at Collins Music Hall, the prize a ten-pound fee and a week's engagement, and with it the beginning of a professional career across the music halls of Britain.

The Accidental Mentalist

Fogel's true direction arrived, as it had for the Great Alexander decades earlier, by accident. When his apparatus failed to arrive for a show, he was forced to improvise an act made entirely of mind-reading effects, and it drew a far warmer response than his usual turn. Playing the Theatre Royal at Blyth, where his slot was among the most popular, the producers pressed him to extend it and to drop the conjuring altogether: "We want the mind-reading act only. It is much better than bits of rope and handkerchiefs." He went home and stayed up most of the night devising his first full mentalism routine. The seed had in truth been planted long before, for his father's interest in spiritualism had given Fogel an early curiosity about psychic phenomena, and he had quietly experimented with mind-reading effects at close-up engagements before the more discerning audiences, jotting his successes and failures in one of the many notebooks he kept. The debut was poor, his nerves getting the better of him, but with tips from some RADA-trained actors in the cast he refined it within days, and by the end of the week the audience adored it. The one-man mental show would remain his act for the rest of his life.

War, Casso and Casandra

The timing was fortunate, for when war came it was all but impossible to obtain props while serving, and a props-free mental act was ideal. A chance friendship with Corporal Henry Lewis led to Fogel's transfer to the Stars in Battledress entertainment unit, and during his service he won fame and press attention with a series of sensational predictions, the kind of headline-making forecasts that would become a hallmark of his publicity for the rest of his career. Ever willing to add mystery to his billing, he performed for a time under the names Casso and Casandra before settling, at last, on the identity that would make him famous.

The Amazing Fogel

By 1947, at the Grand Theatre in Bolton, Fogel was presenting what was probably the first genuine one-man mental act to run in British variety. The Fogel Road Show grew to incorporate specialty acts and a clutch of startling illusions, the Vanishing Nude, Through the Eye of a Needle, Cheating the Gallows, a Spirit Cabinet, hypnotism, and the two pieces that defined him: the bullet catch and Russian Roulette. A keen student of psychology, he distilled some of his thinking in 1949 into a slim booklet, Fogelism, on relaxation, the subconscious and applied psychological principles. His methods, he always maintained, were simple; it was his presentation that turned them into miracles. A lifelong student of psychology and of his own audiences, he grasped that the secret mattered far less than the manner of its telling, and he laboured over staging where others merely chased new tricks, his restless search for fresh ideas producing one brilliant routine after another.

The Bullet Catch and Russian Roulette

Fogel performed Russian Roulette like no one else. He raised the stakes to six rifles, five loaded with genuine bullets and one empty; the rifles were mixed, one chosen at random and aimed directly at his heart, the rest trained on plates on a rack behind him. The genius lay in the selling. With everything set and the audience braced, he would stop the action, step forward and address them directly, asking, with perfect timing, whether, since he might shortly be lying dead and unable to hear it, they might be so kind as to applaud now. The house roared. Then the drama resumed, the rifles were re-aimed, a short countdown followed, and on the command they roared into life in an earsplitting volley, the plates behind him shattering and clattering to the boards as Fogel staggered, just long enough to make the faint-hearted gasp before he straightened and took his ovation. When the audience grasped that he was unharmed, the applause raised the roof. It was showmanship of the highest order, and it was not without genuine danger; he suffered several accidents over the years, through no fault of his own. No wonder he was the Amazing Fogel.

Later Years and Legacy

In 1950 Fogel travelled to America, where he befriended the bandleader and amateur magician Richard Himber, but found work hard to come by and returned to England the following year. He continued to delight magical conventions with sensational publicity, and as variety declined he spent much of his time cruising with P&O and performing for Butlin's. He died of a heart attack on 30 October 1981, aged seventy, while waiting for a train at Golders Green Underground station, his little case of props in one hand and his blackboard under his arm, on his way to perform for his friend Terry Seabrooke. He is remembered for some quite exceptional effects, for outstanding charm, and for being an extremely good performer, the quality, perhaps, that most reliably separates the successful from the merely competent.

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From The Magic Circular

This profile is adapted and expanded from Roberto Forzoni's original feature in The Magic Circular, the journal of The Magic Circle, September 2015.

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